Lighting

If you are ever going to take a photograph what you will need aside from your camera is light.The most basic light equipment is your flash. May that be a built-in flash or an external flash, or a corded standing flash... it fires off with high (or adjusted) power for a short time.However there are scenes where you will definitely want your subject to be pre-lit, so you can set up your shots and not have to depend on flashes that fire only when you "pull the trigger". These mostly (but not all of them) are shots where human people are involved: portraits, fashion shots...etc, but also it could be a still.There is a number called lighting-ratio which determines the contrast of your pre-lit pictures. (If you are using more than 1 light source of course.)In studio these are key and ambient lights. (Out of the studio these are Ambient and Fill lights - fill light is usually a fill-flash). If the key light (light that lights the subject) is at power level 1, and the ambient light (the light source that lights most of the background and fills in the rest of the subject that is unlit) is also at power level 1, the light ratio is 1:1.If you lower the ambient light to half, the ratio becomes 2:1. (Key light is the first number.) To effectively use the various contrast results of these settings, experiment with different settings before you start your shooting. The common settings are: 1:1 2:1 4:1 and 8:1. Ambient power 8:1 is 1/8th power of the key light.If you are shooting outside, you'll probably have 1 main source of light: the sun. (Except for night-shots of course.) To compensate and decrease (or increase) contrast you might want to use a flash. The flash can act as a key or as an ambient light (depending on the power of the sunlight and the pre-set power of your flash).If sunlight is low it plays the ambient light role and flash will be your key light. (Note, that it will probably result in a very high contrast ratio: ~16:1).If the sun is at medium power (cloudy day or shortly after sunrise), you can (if it supports this) change the power of your flash to make it play the role of the ambient light, or put it to full power to make it play the key light role.If the sun is at full power, your flash won't have a chance to play the key role, so you might wish to use it as an ambient light source to light darker scenes such as forests or sunshaded places.

The same sculpture with 8:1 4:1 and 2:1 lighting ratios.

This image was taken against the sun but with no flash used... the subject is quite dark.